A twentieth-century writer of popular fiction, Margery Lawrence published nearly thirty novels in a wide range of genres, including adventure-romance and novels of the supernatural. The generic boundaries of her novels are fluid, and many verge on horror or on ghost and fantasy fiction. Female sexuality looms large in her work and she often places female characters in impossible predicaments, often involving social convention, money, or class. Her nine short story collections, like her novels, are deeply informed by her Spiritualist beliefs. They involve mediums—human vehicles through which spirits communicate with the living—and the materialisation of connections between the living and the dead through ghostly visions or communication. Margery Lawrence claimed that much of her Spiritualist fiction is based on real-life experience—either her own or that of first-hand witnesses. She also published two studies on Spiritualism and an autobiography in verse.
Milestones
1913 ML first appeared in print when her father published her volume of early poetry,
Songs of Childhood, and Other Verses.
1945 ML's regular publisher,
Robert Hale, printed the first of her occult-detective stories featuring the detective Miles Pennoyer:
Number Seven, Queer Street.
13 November 1969 ML died in
London; the cause appears not to be known.
1971 ML's final novel,
Autumn Rose, appeared more than a year after her death.
